Tara Sullivan

I feel like I left a situationship and got married.

Seven years ago, my 20 year relationship with freelancing ended. My employer and I committed to each other and I couldn’t be happier. No more endless hustle, counting heads in class to calculate my pay, trying to elbow my way to the busiest class times, always competing for the most devoted students or the hottest new studio or the thing that will make my class more popular. Any freelance yoga teacher who says this doesn’t apply to them is lying.

I don’t feel the seven-year itch.

I am not aware of any other yoga school, anywhere in the world, that supports not only teachers but supports yoga like this. I have taught public yoga classes in so many studios and have had to find my own sub if my kid got sick, had no income if I took time off, was responsible for promoting my own classes, had to do check-in, sell class cards and memberships, and set up, open, close, or clean, all to earn around what it cost me to pay a babysitter so I could come teach the class. Now I work as part of a team where we support one another, I never feel I am on my own, and we don’t count heads for our paychecks, so my focus can be where it belongs: on serving the students and the community.

Talk about sthira sukham āsanam; I get benefits like health insurance and paid time off, not to mention stability and legitimacy in a country where finding a place to live is nearly impossible without an Arbeitsvertrag. I love being employed so much and I love my employer for taking me and my profession seriously (I’m looking at you, Three Boons Yoga f/k/a Jivamukti Yoga Berlin).

Patanjali’s instruction in the Yoga Sutras, sthira sukham āsanam, meaning, the connection to the earth should be steady and joyful, calls us to think not only of ourselves, but of our relationship to all beings. For a relationship to be steady and joyful, it must be mutually beneficial.

The endless freelance situation in the current yoga environment is a scourge that takes advantage of both the teachers and the students alike. The most important skills for new freelance teachers to succeed are not yogic, but marketing. We need a revolution that reconfigures the whole industry to creating a steady and joyful environment not only for the students but for everyone involved.

The value of the global yoga market was estimated in 2023 to be $107.1 billion and is expected to grow at a rate of of 9.4% from 2024 to 2030. More and more of that wealth is concentrated, as with all wealth, at the top: in the private equity firms that own the largest brand name yoga studios and the shareholders of the public companies like Lululemon, selling us plastic clothing made in developing countries. Income disparity is in full effect in the yoga world, where western practitioners spend more on a yoga outfit and a mat than the average Indian earns in a month.

Now that most students come to class on these venture capital fitness apps, the middle man (the predatory venture capitalists that make the apps) takes the already small profit margin. I find this trend particularly threatening; venture capital will devour everything in its path to make money. When people get these apps from their employers as a perk, it creates the illusion that yoga classes are free and thus reduces their perceived value. Never mind the business model that turns what is intended to be a daily practice into a certain number of visits a month here, a certain number there.

It is possible that these apps may ultimately take down the mom and pop shops, like our beloved school, and we will all be left with only huge chains that endlessly scale and churn through inexperienced, idealistic teachers who become disposable cogs in a money-making machine. One doesn’t have to look very far to see examples of this in other industries.

All that said, if there is a place able to create a different outcome, that place is definitely Berlin.

My teacher Sharon Gannon often said, “Yoga is all about relationships.” It took me a long time to understand what she meant. My hope is that western yoga won’t get stuck in confused venture capitalist adolescence but will mature into a natural part of society that supports and is supported. I want to see yoga taken seriously, to create steady and joyful relationships at all facets of life. Through practice, we experience all life as equally holy beings, as Ram Das says, walking each other home.